finger is a modern finger-protocol client.

The fingerverse (i.e., the collection of all finger-sites) is an early Internet-based social networks, with its origins in the early 1970s. Like with a lot of things from the early Internet — the fingervese is a decentralized network.

Once you have finger installed, try running this command:

finger reiver@plan.cat

Although there are other ways you can use finger — in most case, you are probably going to use finger in this way. But just with a different query.

For example, here is a similar example usage of finger but with a different query (of the same user@host type):

finger charles@finger.farm

The way you can understand a finger-query is:

    finger joeblow@example.com
           \_____/ \_________/
             |           |
         a person      a community
             or           named
         a service     “example.com”
           named
         “joeblow”

So with this query —

• there is a community (running on a computer connected to the Internet) called “example.com”, and
• there is a person (within that community) whose username is “joeblow”.

Here is how, in general, you can use finger:

finger [/switch] [user][@host…]

So we see that, finger can be called with:

• an optional switch,
• an optional user, and
• zero, one, or many @host

Here are a bunch of examples to try to help show what this really means:

finger
finger /W
finger /W joeblow
finger /W joeblow@example.com
finger /W joeblow@example.com@reiver.link
finger /W @example.com
finger /W @example.com@reiver.link
finger joeblow
finger joeblow@example.com
finger joeblow@example.com@reiver.link
finger @example.com
finger @example.com@reiver.link
finger dariush@once.com@twice.net@thrice.org@fource.net
finger /PULL charlie@reiver.link
finger /PUSH malekeh@reiver.link
finger /LIST dariush@reiver.link
finger /PICK elizabeth@reiver.link
finger /path/to/something.ext
finger /path/to/something.ext joeblow@example.com
finger /path/to/something.ext joeblow@example.com@reiver.link

Traditionally you could get more information if you use something called the whois switch.

The way you can use the whois switch is like this —

If this is what you planned to query (without the whois switch):

finger reiver@plan.cat

Then to add the whois switch do this:

finger /W reiver@plan.cat

Note that the /W was added in the middle. It is that simple.

(Although note that — some finger-servers show more information. But some do not.)

finger allows for custom switches.

I.e., switches other than '/W'

So, for example, if we wanted to do a finger-request with a (custom) /PULL switch, then we could do it like this:

finger /PULL reiver@plan.cat

We could also use any other name:

finger /PUSH reiver@plan.cat
finger /LIST reiver@plan.cat
finger /BANANA reiver@plan.cat

It is up to the finger-server if it will handle the customer switch or not. It might not.

Application finger was written by Charles Iliya Krempeaux